


orotund

by Hope



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-23
Updated: 2005-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:27:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><b>orotund</b> \OR-uh-tuhnd\, <i>adjective</i>:</p><p>1. Characterized by fullness, clarity, strength, and smoothness of sound.</p><p>2. Pompous; bombastic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	orotund

He always moves too quiet, as if he don’t feel it’s his place for his feet to make more sound against Serenity’s floor panels than the meek little clicking of the heels of his shiny shoes. Serenity’s engine’s up and humming happily like the beating of a bee’s wing, fat and glorious, so that masks the sound some too, and when Kaylee looks up to see him standing in the doorway there like an apparition left behind where it don’t belong so much any more, she startles so much that she curses. Which ain’t a thing in itself, she’s always been known to cuss when the occasion arises, and sometimes when it don’t, but this time it irks her some for a reason she can’t figure, though she don’t particularly like to admit that it might have something to do with the blush rising up over her cheeks. She reaches up a hand, makes as if to scratch an itch, thumbing across her own cheek and it feels greasy, and when she glances down her thumb’s dark with it too.

“Yeah?” she says, maybe a little to abrupt, but what does he expect, coming upon her like that with no warning? and Simon ducks his head and drops his arms from where they’re braced against either side of the doorway to cross over his chest. His head does that tilty-back thing with his eyes still sliding around where she’s now standing, hands on hips, looking at him.

“I was…” he starts, lifts an arm, makes a vague gesture over his shoulder. “I was just wondering if you’d…” His mouth moves a bit with no sound coming out, and her tongue pokes the corner of her cheek involuntarily, the movement standing in for something not so cultured to come out. He’s wearing blue, again, sleek tailored cut of his vest with the bottom button left undone, _again_, his shirt white like negative space in the warm, cluttered mess of the engine room.

“Cap’n needs me to fix this now,” she says, gesturing to the backup cooling unit with a wrench. His head tilts back a little further before his mouth finally closes and he nods.

“I’ll just…” he makes another vague gesture, his body turning a little as if it’s making to leave without him, and she crouches back down, the perfect rhythmic whirr of the engine bringing its arms ’round to fill up her ears again.

“You go right ahead,” she says, raising her voice just a little to carry over the noise, and turns to give him a parting smile. He blinks. Leaves. She’d stick her hand in to give the engine a pat, if her arm wouldn’t get ripped off in the process.

**Author's Note:**

> http://hopeful-fiction.livejournal.com/37132.html


End file.
